In recent years, cloning techniques have been used to prepare computing resources in the cloud and replicate (reproduce) a user environment. User environments are reproduced in a virtual environment remotely from a user environment confidentially and without enabling direct access for a variety of purposes, including identifying problems, operational support, performance tuning, reviewing the current environment, and supporting the transition to a new environment.
Reproducing a user environment in the cloud means duplicating (cloning) a physical (non-virtual) environment in a virtual environment. In cloning to a virtual environment, computer resources such as a CPU, memory, storage, network, and software are provided (provisioned) virtually, and a user environment resembling the actual user environment is constructed in the cloud.
However, a user environment cannot be flexibly reproduced and constructed in the cloud using current cloning techniques while also taking into account user security issues.
Techniques for reproducing application test environments are described in Patent Literature 1 and 2. A method for reproducing a system environment and a technique for modifying a system environment are described in Patent Literature 3. However, the literature does not mention a method for reproducing software or a system environment while maintaining reproduction accuracy and taking into account confidential information.